Saturday night again. The downtown streets were beginning to feel the crush of all those nine-to-fivers who needed the weekend break, and the cops drove around in their air-conditioned cars hoping for nothing worse than a little petty theft to interrupt the shift.

Sheila sat in her tiny bathroom in her tiny apartment on 37th St. and wished for the millionth time that just this once she could stay home. At least tonight she was going to pin her hair up, no matter what the man said. 102° today, the news said, and it wouldn’t get really cool all night long. The hell with him.

“Guys like long hair,” he told her again and again. “You wear it down and that’s that.” 102°. The hell with him.

She pulled a bright purple tank top from the second-to-bottom drawer. It wasn’t quite clean, but she was pretty sure no one would notice. Thigh high boots with stiletto heels—the red ones, tonight—and those shorts, shredded at the edges.

By the time she finished her makeup and clipped her long hair up off her neck, it was already past the time the man wanted her on the street. He’d be annoyed, she knew, but she’d get around it. So far, she could still do that.

Sheila walked the half block to her usual spot near the 7-11 store at Barchester. Phyllis was already there, griping as usual.

“Hey, Sheila,” she said. “You picked a lousy time to be this late. The man’s on a rampage.” She took a long draw on her smoke and glanced around her before she went on. “Some guy punched out Monica earlier, and that new broad was stupid enough to get busted again, so he noticed you weren’t here right away.”

A car pulled up and the driver made it halfway out the door before Phyllis yelled, “Hey! You can’t park here!”

“Says who?”

Phyllis flicked her cigarette end at him. “Listen, I’m just a business girl and you’re interfering with my customers. Isn’t there a free trade law or something?”

The Premise Behind It All

Some time ago I found a delightful group of writers, the Orange County Writers Guild, affectionately known as Book Bandits. Meeting each week for a couple of hours, these creative people write for a specified time (usually 25 minutes) and come up with impromptu stories based on three prompts. The results are always amazing, both in the variety and in the quality of the writing.
Sometimes it's possible to use all three prompts; other times the prompts just hang there in limbo while we scribble about something else altogether.
This page is my 25 minutes’ worth for this date.

Recent Posts: After The Commercial

Well, I managed to avoid joining the stream of folks wishing happiness and prosperity to everyone on WordPress, YouTube, Facebook, and all the other social communication avenues. Oh, it’s not that I wish misery and penury to any of you; it’s just that I prefer to extend my wishes a little more individually. Besides, I’ve […]

I recently bought an album of music from the iTunes store. Now, this isn’t particularly unusual for me, because I love music of several different types, and iTunes is an easy way for me to preview something and decide if I want to just have it for background on the computer, or it I want […]

What is? The book, of course! Brevity in Paradise is available in paperback on Amazon, and with Prime shipping, I got mine (all ten copies) the day after publication. Am I ridiculously thrilled to have a small part of a self-published book out there? Of course I am. I can’t remember a time when I […]

Idioms drop into our language from sources that we’d never think about and then change so that the original connotation is lost forever. Sometimes, I have to say, this is a good thing. A lot of the time the new meaning gets absorbed into our speech and thoughts so thoroughly that we never even consider […]

Ha! I’ll bet you thought I was going to say Lake Wobegon, didn’t you? Maybe not. Maybe Prairie Home Companion has gently faded into memories like so many other good things. Our local PBS station stopped broadcasting this program, along with several other favorites, several years ago when they decided to change their format or […]